Learning Community Approach in the Primary Education: Learning about Bullying through a Foreign Language
Keywords:
learning communities; foreign language; content-based learning; bullying; social awarenessAbstract
Bullying constitutes a social phenomenon that takes place
mainly in the school environment all over the world. Schools and the
authorities of several countries have been trying to give an end to this
situation training teachers and informing thoroughly students about it.
The aim of this paper is to delve into the learning community approach
that aided the students of the sixth grade of the Greek state high school
to raise students' awareness about bullying in the EFL class and develop
their four language skills in English as a foreign language. This pilot
project, following the principles of the Learning Community approach,
has been piloted with a class of 20 Greek-speaking children (aged 12
years old) who had been learning English for 3 years at school. It was
initiated with the purpose to provide insights into developing students'
knowledge in Bullying since it has become the matter of concern around
the world because of the various factors that cause it and the
consequences it has on children while English was the language of
instruction. The sixth grade students developed their own multimodal
material and shared it for informing the students of the forth primary
school grade about bullying in the FL lesson. For the estimation of the
feasibility of this project, we have used two basic tools a) a pre- and a
post- test about the language and the theme knowledge assessment and
b) journals kept by the teacher throughout the project. The findings
showed a significant improvement of the students' skills in FL, as well
as their improvement in the specific vocabulary of the thematic area of
“bullying/victimization” in the target language while it became obvious
that the students enjoyed the whole process of developing materials in
the foreign language especially about a social phenomenon.
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